There is growing recognition that children assessed as needing free school meals (FSM) can struggle during the school holidays.
Families that labour to make ends meet during term time are not suddenly blessed with extra money coming in once the holidays start. If they can’t get by normally, then the situation does not improve when school is out.
Understanding that holidays, in fact, place extra pressure on families to feed children has prompted the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on School Food to look into the issue over the past couple of years, and a number of small-scale, local initiatives have started to take place to address the problem – some run by schools and local authorities, some by charities and some supported by food banks.
Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions suggest 29% of children in England, about 2.2 million, live in poverty. Not all of these will qualify for FSM and, according to the Department for Education, only 1.3 million are actually registered.
Nevertheless, it leaves a significant number of families struggling to cope with feeding their children during holidays or year-round.
Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, who chairs the APPG on School Food says the evidence is there for all to see: “We have seen a steady rise in food bank usage over recent years, and this is exacerbated outside of term time.
“We need to find ways to help children who experience non-term time hunger.”
Lindsay Graham, who heads the APPG School Food’s Holiday Hunger Action Group, says it is not simply a question of providing extra food.
“Holiday meals should be aligned with learning and fun as well, but we need funding to do this. The UN says children have a right to food, but we have children here in the UK who are going without.”
She is appealing to local authorities, charities and community groups to consider how they can assist, saying the Hunger Action Group had identified ten principles that could help all sorts of different groups start work on holiday feeding initiatives.
“For some groups that want to work in this area, premises are an issue, but we have spent billions of pounds on some of the best schools in the world that lie empty and unused for 13 weeks a year,” she said, suggesting that schools and local authorities need to look at using school kitchen facilities outside of term time.
She is also urging groups who want to get involved in holiday hunger schemes to tap into resources that already exist before they get started.
“Who can help you deliver your project? There are all sorts of groups and organisations that can help.
“You need to ask yourselves whether you want to do this daily, breakfast only, hot or cold, sandwiches and so on.
“And most important is deciding how you can measure the impact of your work and the difference it is making.”
Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), explains the extent of the problem of hungry children with reference to the Child Poverty Act, which defines poverty as income that is 60% of median pay.
“Between 1990 and 2008, child poverty dropped when there was money for child benefit, child tax credit and helping people into work.
“The aim of the act is to reduce child poverty to 10% level but, since 2008, the cost of raising a child has gone up relative to wages, and the £22 billion of benefit cuts we’ve suffered have primarily affected those on low pay.
“The biggest cuts come from not uprating benefits to keep pace with inflation,” she says.
As a result, the number of children in poverty in the UK dropped to 2.3 million in 2011 but is forecast to be up to 3.0 million by 2021 on current trends, according to CPAG figures.
“Most children in poverty live with working parents,” she says. “It steals away children’s life chances, has health costs, results in poorer educational attainment and contributes to neglect, which there is most definitely a cost to dealing with children in poverty.”
She says that food poverty, in particular, leads to lower nutrient intake, children don’t grow as well, parents skip meals to try to help, child friends are not invited round so sociability is curtailed and we see a rise in the use of food banks.
“The Trussel Trust did more than one million food parcels last year, and a survey of teachers with the NASUWT union said that members increasingly see children who lack energy and concentration, and exhibit behavioural problems.”
If the problem is becoming clear enough, what of existing attempts to alleviate it?
Loraine Lawrie and Nicky Joiner work for East Renfrewshire Council in Scotland and have been running holiday camp with a food focus at a school since 2008. Children from across the council area are invited to attend.
“It’s not like regular school dinners, the aim is to ‘nurture’ the children,” says Lawrie. “We have 200 children a day we’ve invited from different schools and give them four hours of activities to make it a fuller day.
“Tables have cutlery, there is an adult at each table, and we help them learn about food and how it’s made, so the programme is about more than just feeding children.
“When you talk to children, they can be encouraged to try new food. We linked up with holiday activity camps and after-school clubs to develop a rounded offering of activities with food.
“It’s been so successful that we’ve added a second school site to accommodate all the children.”
The scheme is run for two weeks during the spring break, four weeks over the summer and for an additional week in the autumn.
Joiner says: “One day, there will be a buffet lunch, on another it’s ‘build your own sandwich’ and there’s usually a special day where something like steak pie will be served.
“The children eat better than they normally do in school, and it gets them to try new food.
“It costs £3.50 a meal to cover all costs, plus £8 a day for sports activities. It works in our area because few families have children qualified for FSM.”
Another operator of holiday feeding schemes is an organisation called Make Lunch, a network of churches that started in 2011 and today helps fund 41 kitchens that between them are expected to serve 11,500 meals to 2,500 children this year.
Rachel Warwick of Make Lunch, says: “Free school meals make a huge difference almost two million children, but what happens to them in the holidays? When schools are closed so are the kitchens.
“During school holidays, our lunch kitchens provide free, healthy, cooked food for pupils who usually receive free school meals.
“All our kitchens are run by volunteers, and are relying on donations of money and time to make things happen. And because we believe that one meal for one child makes a difference, we know that every single volunteer at every single kitchen is important.”
She says the group’s website offers interested groups a set of standards that they are asked to follow.
“The extent of the funding you have got, what you can get from suppliers and how many suppliers determine how big you can be,” she says.
Make Lunch is one of the partners identified by foodservice supplier Brakes, which is launching its own foray into this area called Meals & More. This aims to team up with food, drink and equipment suppliers, and groups like Make Lunch to ‘facilitate’ delivery of local holiday feeding programmes.
This month, Brakes is launching its Meals & More initiative and hoping to sign up suppliers on one side and volunteers on the other to create clubs to provide holiday meals.
Another initiative that is already well established is programme called Holiday Kitchen that is organised by the social housing group Ashram Housing Association (AHA) and provides food and play during school holidays.
Dr Caroline Wolhuter of AHA said Holiday Kitchen was set up in 2012 in response to calls for food banks and holiday activities.
“It is aimed at pre-school and primary-age children, and combines learning life skills with having fun and tasty nutritious meals.”
Its activities are based in hostels that are open during the holidays, and target mums and carers with children. It offers guidance on social inclusion, financial inclusion (avoiding debt and getting out of it), as well as improving nutrition and well-being.
“We started with packed lunches but have moved on to a more varied offering that mixes cold and hot food.”
Holiday Kitchen offers 5,300 activity days each year for 800 people through 19 community-based delivery partners. The schemes are being evaluated with the help of supporters like Kellogg’s and Change4Life.
“We have strong links with social services, police, food banks, emergency services as well as schools.
“Holidays for some are 13 weeks a year of doing nothing when schools and nurseries are closed. There is a cost in dealing with this because of the spike in service demand.
“Relationship counselling through Relate, for example, sees a rapid rise in demand during holidays. That means there is a risk to family well-being during the holidays, and good-quality activities and food help us meet a range of outcomes we hardly realised even existed when we started this.”
AHA runs ten schemes in the West Midlands, 12 in Manchester and a further ten in Nottingham funded by local authorities.
The need to provide an evidence base for action and for then evaluating that action is something close to the heart of Professor Greta Defeyter, who works at the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at Northumbria University.
“We need evidence to see which programmes are working and where the benefits are seen,” she says.
She says there has been a 500,000-strong rise in the number of children in food poverty, and many families have reacted by serving food that is laden with salt, fat and sugar because it is perceived as more filling for the money.
“And we know that food poverty becomes more acute during school holidays. The question is, why help?
“Well, it’s a basic human right to have access to food for a healthy diet, and we know there’s a clear link between food and academic attainment – particularly in areas of poverty and among primary-age children.
“We are doing something about it in term time, but what about holidays?”
Defeyter also challenges the idea that simply providing one meal a day is enough for children.
“Breakfast helps cognitive performance, cuts unhealthy snacking, teaches children to socialise and helps them in later life in terms of healthy weight management. It’s important, and concentrating on lunch alone during the holidays is not enough.”
She says research by the Food Research and Action Centre (FRAC) shows that children’s meal intake is different during holidays than term time.
“It’s more sporadic, there is less nutritional value and children are, in fact, less physically active over holidays.
“You can see a growing obesity crisis staring at you down the barrel of a gun because figures show children have a quicker gain in BMI over the six-week holiday than over the whole of a term.”
Her own research has measured breakfast provision, recreation, family impact, school preparedness and food security at six breakfast clubs.
“We found that 71% of parents said it was harder to get by during the holidays, 94% spent more on food, 62% said they sometimes went without meals themselves during summer, and many parents reported they cut down on social and cultural activities.”